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Achieve Individuation: Conscious - Unconscious Assimilation

In Modern Man in Search of a Soul, C.G. Jung discusses the keys to assimilating the unconscious mind
with the conscious mind and achieving the ultimate goal of individuation:

Dreams
give information about the secrets of the inner life and reveal to the dreamer
hidden factors of his personality. As long as these are undiscovered, they
disturb his waking life and betray themselves only in the form of symptoms.
This means that we cannot effectively treat the patient from the side of
consciousness alone, but must bring about a change in and through the
unconscious. As far as present knowledge goes, there is only one way of doing
this: there must be a thorough-going, conscious assimilation of unconscious
contents. By "assimilation", I mean a mutual interpenetration of
conscious and unconscious contents, and not—as is too commonly thought—a
one-sided valuation, interpretation and deformation of unconscious contents by
the conscious mind.

As to the value and significance of unconscious contents in
general, very mistaken views are abroad. It is well known that the Freudian
school presents the unconscious in a thoroughly depreciatory light, just as
also it looks on primitive man as little better than a wild beast. Its
nursery-tales about the terrible old man of the tribe and its teachings about
the "infantile-perverse-criminal" unconscious have led people to make
a dangerous monster out of the unconscious, that really very natural thing. As
if all that is good, reasonable, beautiful and worth living for had taken up
its abode in consciousness! Have the horrors of the World War really not opened
our eyes? Are we still unable to see that man's conscious mind is even more
devilish and perverse than the unconscious?

I
was recently reproached with the charge that my teaching about the assimilation
of the unconscious, were it accepted, would undermine culture and exalt
primitivity at the cost of our highest values. Such an opinion can have no
foundation other than the erroneous belief that the unconscious is a monster.
Such a view arises from fear of nature and of life as it actually is. Freud has
invented the idea of sublimation to save us from the imaginary claws of the
unconscious. But what actually exists cannot be alchemistically sublimated, and
if anything is apparently sublimated, it never was what a false interpretation
took it to be.

The
unconscious is not a demonic monster, but a thing of nature that is perfectly
neutral as far as moral sense, æsthetic taste and intellectual judgement go. It
is dangerous only when our conscious attitude towards it becomes hopelessly
false. And this danger grows in the measure that we practise repressions. But
as soon as the patient begins to assimilate the contents that were previously
unconscious, the danger from the side of the unconscious diminishes. As the
process of assimilation goes on, it puts an end to the dissociation of the
personality and to the anxiety that attends and inspires the separation of the
two realms of the psyche. That which my critic feared—I mean the overwhelming
of consciousness by the unconscious—is most likely to occur when the
unconscious is excluded from life by repressions, or is misunderstood and
depreciated.

The
way of successive assimilations reaches far beyond the curative results that
specifically concern the doctor. It leads in the end to that distant goal
(which may perhaps have been the first urge to life), the bringing into reality
of the whole human being—that is, individuation.